 Hello and welcome to Newsclick in today's episode of Talking Science in Tech. We are happy to have Praveep Rukhaya start to discuss the issue of the Indian government reportedly planning to restrict exports of the Oxford AstraZeneca Covid vaccine and has been reported that these restrictions are being put in place to meet domestic demands and in light of the surging Covid infections. According to the foreign minister, India has already exported over 60 million doses of the vaccine which has been produced by the Ceramic Street of India and these restrictions will have a very severe effect as well on the global COVAX initiative which provides doses to poorer countries. So here we have with us Praveep Rukhaya start to talk about this issue. India is one of the biggest suppliers in the world on vaccines. We'll come back to how much each country is supplying. In fact, there are only three countries which are supplying vaccines to the rest of the world, not to its own population but to other people as well. One is India. It has AstraZeneca's Oxford vaccine which has been produced by Ceramic Institute. One of the largest vaccine suppliers in the world and other two are Russia and China. These are the only ones who have actually been supplying vaccines to other countries. Most countries at the moment have vaccine manufacturing capability. We are talking of Western Europe, we are talking of UK and we are talking of the United States which is of course the biggest at the moment, the biggest producer. They're all holding their own vaccines, not letting it go out of the country and we all know there is already a huge spat-goating going on between the European Union and UK on this count. But let's look at the big picture. If we look at which countries have been vaccinated, you will find that the world in data has this chart and it shows very clearly that the countries which have vaccinated a large number of its population in percentage terms are not the ones manufacturing or exporting vaccines for others. They are the ones who are really only producing for themselves and this is the United States, UK, parts of European Union. These are the countries who have actually produced vaccine for themselves. You look at India for instance, you will see it has not vaccinated very many of its people. In fact, the number of percentage terms, the number of percentage of people vaccinated are quite low as you can see from the chart. Similarly for China, it seems to have reserved most of its vaccine export for other countries. Russia has vaccinated some people and again has been a large supplier. So if we look at which countries have supplied the vaccines and if we look at for instance, the three countries which supplied the bulk of the vaccines and you have a chart here which shows that it is really only three countries which have supplied vaccines. But if we look at the vaccine production in the world and again we have from Airfinity which supplies a lot of this data, you will see that the number of companies which have produced these vaccines. For instance, you have Pfizer, you have Pfizer BioNTech vaccines and you have also the Moderna vaccines produced in the United States or for the United States. We don't know where they are being produced. Is it only in the United States but elsewhere as well. And you will see there is hardly any export to other countries, some to Israel, it's an ally and some to a few European countries, but otherwise it's not being vaccinated. This is not being exported in very large numbers to any other country. But when you come to the vaccines which are being exported, then you see of course that the AstraZeneca vaccine is the one which is going to different parts of the world. We have exported roughly about 60 million vaccines from India and that has gone to a number of countries and also year marked for the co-vaccine program of WHO. This is the largest supply of vaccines that co-vaccine is going to receive, is going to be from India and up to about July or up to September. This is what the WHO has said that it was supposed to receive 237 million vaccine doses from the Serum Institute, while only 1.2 million vaccines were supposed to have come from Pfizer, supposed to have been secured from Pfizer. Now that is the ratio at which it is operating. So the question is, what does the Indian band of vaccine exports mean? Of course, India as you know, the epidemic is really the numbers are going up. So yes, Indian COVID-19 numbers are rising rapidly. So India has cause for concern and there are calls that since we produce such a large amount of vaccines, why should we not vaccinate our people first? But the problem that we have is given the fact that only India, part of Russia and China are exporting vaccines to others, if India drops out of producing vaccines for others, this is going to give a huge gap. And this is something that the World Health Organization Director General said a few days back, that what is happening is morally reprehensible. It's grotesque that countries which are sitting on vaccines are vaccinating their own people or refusing to share a vaccine with others that we are not only seeing rise of vaccine nationalism at the world level. We are seeing a degree of vaccine selfishness that we have never seen before, particularly at a time when the global scenario is such that unless we inoculate, vaccinate the population of the world, the bulk of the population in the world, we're not going to stop the pandemic. It's not going to stop at national boundaries. And if we do not successfully fight the pandemic at the global level, then the global economy is not going to recover. And as we have discussed earlier as well, that you have the International Chamber of Commerce, the International Monetary Fund, two organizations who have no sympathy with what's called socialized public health medicine or what Ronald Reagan at one's turn as socialist medicine, that unless we do that, that the world economy is not only not going to recover, but the hit to the developed countries, those who are actually leading the vaccine nationalism drive in the world today, they are also going to lose up to $5 trillion by the next three, four years because a global economy, if it does not recover, is going to hit their export as well as hit the raw materials or the finished goods it requires for its own consumption. So this is the situation that we have a scenario if we all work together. And that's a real possibility. We can fight the pandemic much better. We are refusing to do that. And the second plank in that fight would be that there is huge amount of vaccine capability, production capability idling in the world because not everybody's vaccines have been successful. But there is no interest in sharing the technology with countries or with production facilities or with companies who don't have their own vaccine, utilizing it for immediately producing more vaccine the world needs. This is not being done because profit motive trumps everything else. And therefore intellectual property and this is not patents, it's intellectual property. You know how what you do to need to scale up production. Those are the things which are not being accepted. If you take the WTO platform, the rich countries, basically because of their pharmaceutical companies have opposed it, opposed it to the name. Therefore, this proposal by India and South Africa has failed. It's not getting any traction. So we have on one hand that as a scenario that is standing in front of us of extreme selfishness coupled with looking at the vaccine, producing profits for some country companies, Pfizer and Moderna looking at the tens of millions of dollars of profit for the next one to years. So that is what is standing in the way of really fighting pandemic globally together. And if we want to fight it together, yes, it can be fought. If we want to fight it the way we are doing now, some countries will get vaccines. India may be the lucky one because we have 60% of the world's capacity to produce vaccines. So that may help us, but it is not going to help the rest of the world. Unfortunately for the West, this is also going to isolate them politically because only two other countries apart from India were just producing supplying vaccine in large numbers, large quantities. And you can see the map that is there in front of you will show that about 800 million doses have either been supplied or have been ordered on Russia and China. And they are looking at therefore gaining from this vaccine export, providing vaccine to others. In the case of China, they have different policy internally. They're vaccinating their people, but they're also seeing that the disease, the pandemic doesn't take roots in China. So that has been their policy, but they're also exporting vaccine to others. So even if the India, the Quad can talk about really the Indo-Pacific and all of that, but the reality is at the moment, it's a pandemic which should be at the center stage. And if we want to do that, cooperative vaccine policies are what we require, not competitive vaccine nationalities.